Dan Watson | Gristhttp://grist.org
We're an online news organization that uses humor to interpret green issues & inspire environmental action.Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:32:50 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/330e84b0272aae748d059cd70e3f8f8d?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngDan Watson | Gristhttp://grist.org
The U.S. budget slashes information-gathering on energyhttp://grist.org/article/2011-05-02-the-u-s-budget-slashes-information-gathering-on-energy/
http://grist.org/article/2011-05-02-the-u-s-budget-slashes-information-gathering-on-energy/#respondTue, 03 May 2011 00:07:27 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-05-02-the-u-s-budget-slashes-information-gathering-on-energy/]]> In times of rising gas prices and uncertainty about the nation's overall energy future, it would seem that obtaining information on energy would be a top priority for our government. But not so. The Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Department of Energy, is facing a 14 percent cut in the 2011 spending bill. That'll hamper its ability to crunch numbers on gas prices, oil and gas production, and industry profits. Sure, gas prices are shaping up to be a major football for the 2012 election, but talk is cheap, and data is expensive!

“Congress will need to do a better job of protecting the federal programs, like the Energy Information Administration, that are crucial to our understanding what is actually going on with energy supplies, energy demand and energy markets,” [Sen. Jeff] Bingaman [D-N.M.] said.

Government should be in the business of understanding what is actually going on? A lot of your fellow public servants in Congress are going to have to agree to disagree with you on that one, Sen. Bingaman.

Perhaps the government being informed about its energy resources might be handy for the nation's long-term fiscal health. But nothing connotes seriousness in Washington so much as poorly thought-out short-term hacks at this year's deficit in the name of austerity.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2011-05-02-the-u-s-budget-slashes-information-gathering-on-energy/feed/0Pro sports are going greener, and that means the rest of us are toohttp://grist.org/sustainable-business/2011-04-11-pro-sports-going-greener/
http://grist.org/sustainable-business/2011-04-11-pro-sports-going-greener/#respondTue, 12 Apr 2011 06:07:10 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-04-11-pro-sports-going-greener/]]>The Seattle Sounders don’t just have crazy fans. Their facilities have a 57.6 percent landfill diversion rate.Photo: Mike HPro sports may not seem like a natural ally for environmentalists. Players fly from Boston to Los Angeles and back for a single game. Leagues and teams convince cities to build expensive and often unneeded new facilities with taxpayer money. Fans clog up roads as they drive to games and clog up trash cans with hot-dog wrappers and beer cups once they arrive.

But six teams representing six major North American sports leagues have kicked off a new effort to make themselves more sustainable: the Green Sports Alliance. No, they won’t stop flying to games or pushing for plush stadiums, but they will use less energy, recycle and compost more, and green their procurement practices by buying more eco-friendly goods. All of the founding teams are from the Pacific Northwest — MLB’s Seattle Mariners, NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, NHL’s Vancouver Canucks, WNBA’s Seattle Storm, and MLS’ Seattle Sounders FC — but the alliance aims to get teams from all around the U.S. and Canada to join in.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which laid the groundwork for the GSA, has been working with pro sports teams and leagues for years to help them get greener. I caught up with NRDC Senior Scientist Allen Hershkowitz to find out what kind of environmental progress is being made in professional sports and how that can ripple out through the broader culture. He was enthusiastic about the leagues’ commitment to a smarter future, and their ability to change not just the way they do business but also hearts and minds. “Sports are the most watched TV shows in the world,” Hershkowitz said. “And if you want to change the world, you’ve got to go where the world is.”

Q.What kind of effect might the greening of pro sports have on business in America?

A. The NBA is now promoting fuel-efficient vehicles at its games. Pepsi has now changed its bottle to [one made from] agricultural waste. I have been in the room when officials of MLB have talked to Pepsi about the environmental impacts of its vending machines and its waste. When Pepsi hears about environmentalism from MLB, it’s a lot more important than hearing about it from the NRDC.

Recycling at the 2009 MLB All-Star Game in St. Louis.With football, we’re going to start seeing more solar panels, recycling, water conservation. People don’t go to football games thinking about the environment, but when they get there and see environmental messaging, it becomes part of their consciousness about the way civilization should be.

We use the leverage of these leagues to get our message to the supply chain, which is the holy grail of environmentalism. 95 percent of our products’ impacts happen upstream, before you open the package. If we could get the concessionaires to have more organic food, more local food, that will change agriculture. The Rose Garden Arena in Portland has a grass-fed burger. I’ve worked with the leagues to make more vegetarian options.

How cool would it be if we could get parents who have their kids in little leagues to understand that some of the chemicals used to maintain little league fields are not healthy? NRDC worked with MLB, which builds 50 [little league] fields a year, on design specifications on those fields. Now it’s heavily prioritizing recycled materials and nontoxic chemicals. Now these facility managers in local towns are getting [procurement] specifications from MLB. That mainstreams our issue. There’s a certain force, a cultural potency, that NRDC or Greenpeace could never provide.

Q.How did NRDC get the opportunity to consult with the leagues?

A. The brand name of professional sports is incredibly valuable. Companies pay millions of dollars to put their logo next to the brands because they impart a certain level of nonpartisanship and mainstream America. We approached the leagues and told them we’re going to protect their brand against environmental mistakes and make sure that their environmental messaging is accurate, and they trust us. We don’t want their money, so we’re not just another consulting firm looking for a contract. The authenticity that they have gotten for collaborating with us has got them praised.

It would be terrible for Major League Baseball or the National Football League to be promoting environmentally inferior products under the guise of environmental stewardship. Let’s just take the most crass possible example — “clean coal.” The coal industry would love to be marketing “clean coal” to professional sports, but guess what? They can’t do it, because every professional sports league is in partnership with NRDC and now the GSA when it comes to environmental messaging. We are contacted weekly by the leagues regarding potential sponsors who want to participate in the green space. We tell them yes or no.

For example, Monsanto came to the National Hockey League and said that they wanted to sponsor all of their green work. Gary Bettman, the commissioner, consulted us. We gave him a report on Monsanto. And to his credit, the NHL rejected this really lucrative proposal from Monsanto. This is the kind of information clearing that the GSA is now going to be able to help bring to all leagues throughout the country.

Solar panels line the roof of the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, home of the NBA’s Lakers and Clippers.

Q.What are you trying to accomplish with the Green Sports Alliance?

A. First, it’s going to advocate for measurement of environmental impacts at all stadiums and arenas, nationally, across all leagues. Right now only MLB consistently measures energy use, water use, waste and recycling, and paper procurement consistently. We’re also circulating information about “better practices” (because there is no such thing as the best) to inspire teams. That includes what’s the best way to do fan education.

There are a lot of options out there when it comes to green procurement, and most professional sports teams and leagues do not have the staff to weigh the relative benefits of the various options in terms of biological and ecological value. The GSA will help the teams and the leagues to make the most environmentally authentic [purchasing] decisions.

Q.Why are the leagues interested in more than just the appearance, the brand, the PR of “green,” but in actually helping the environment?

A. You don’t get to be the head of one of these leagues by being stupid or out of touch with culture. The science on climate change is irrefutable. These guys follow the facts. My experience with the commissioners and their staffs is that they are personally committed to this issue.

The New York Yankees may be the “Evil Empire,” but they’ve still got recycling and composting.All businesses want brand loyalty. The New York Times wants repeat readers, IBM wants repeat buyers, but they’re nothing like brand loyalty to sports teams. Brand loyalty to sports teams is passed down generation to generation. Brand loyalty is so strong that some of these businesses expect their customers to get into fistfights with customers of other businesses.

Sports have to be attuned to our society in a way that other businesses can avoid. Sports cannot avoid paying attention to whether the country is at war or not. Sports cannot avoid civil rights. They cannot avoid racial equality. Sports cannot avoid environmentalism any more, and that’s what this is about. We have helped them realize that and capture that cause.

Breaking down the barrier between macho football and hockey players and crunchy, Birkenstock environmentalists — to me, this is a watershed moment in the environmental community. We have taken our issue to a level of cultural parity that we’ve never achieved before. My mantra is: If you want to change the world, you don’t emphasize how different you are from everyone else. I know environmentalists who pride themselves on the fact that they don’t own a TV. That’s fine for personal reasons, but as a professional advocate, I should be fired if I didn’t own a TV, because how would I know what’s happening in the world that I’m trying to change?

Also, sports are fun. Every neighborhood has a baseball field. Every high school has a sports team. Is this something we should ignore? Why have we ignored this for 40 years? Would I rather spend my next two years lobbying Congress, or would I rather spend my next two years working with MLB, the NFL, the NHL, and the NBA changing the supply chain to sports and doing fan education on the environment?

Q.You could be criticized for lending an imprimatur to practices that are not green enough.

A. We’ve got to be real. If you want to really change the world, you’ve got to deal with the people who really influence the world and meet them on their terms. If I go into MLB and start preaching an environmental message, they’re going to blow me off, but if I go in there and I’m sensitive to their business and what they’re doing and the importance of their league to our culture, then I figure out how to advance my agenda using their business model. This way, they can make money and get more fans while advancing environmentalism, and that’s what we’re beginning to do.

]]>http://grist.org/sustainable-business/2011-04-11-pro-sports-going-greener/feed/0soundersfans-flickr-mikeh.jpgSeattle Sounders fansSt. Louis recyclingsolar panels at the Staples CenterNew York Yankees recycling and compostingForeign oil follies: Stop Obama if you think you’ve heard this one beforehttp://grist.org/oil/2011-04-05-stop-obama-if-you-think-you-heard-this-one-before/
http://grist.org/oil/2011-04-05-stop-obama-if-you-think-you-heard-this-one-before/#respondWed, 06 Apr 2011 05:09:08 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-04-05-stop-obama-if-you-think-you-heard-this-one-before/]]>President Obama is talking big about reducing our consumption of foreign oil. We predict he’ll be just as successful as his predecessors …

After the BP oil spill, The Daily Show did a roundup of past presidential calls for us to use less oil. As Jon Stewart concluded, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me eight times, am I a f*cking idiot?”

Here’s a rundown:

George W. Bush’s 2006 State of the Union address: “Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”

Bill Clinton in a news conference on June 28, 2000: “But the main thing I would say to you is, we need a long-term energy strategy to maximize conservation and maximize the development of alternative sources of energy and also maximize domestic sources of energy.”

Then-Vice-President George H.W. Bush said in his speech at the 1988 Republican Convention that “there is no security for the United States in further dependence on foreign oil.” (When he was renominated four years later, he said that “I introduced a new domestic energy strategy which would cut our dependence on foreign oil by 7 million barrels a day.”)

Ronald Reagan told Congress in 1981 that part of his Program for Economic Recovery “will continue support of research leading to development of new technologies and more independence from foreign oil.”

Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech on July 15, 1979 warned that “intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation. … Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 — never.”

And just one year before, Richard Nixon had pledged that “we will break the back of the energy crisis; we will lay the foundation for our future capacity to meet America’s energy needs from America’s own resources. … Let this be our national goal: At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need …”

]]>http://grist.org/oil/2011-04-05-stop-obama-if-you-think-you-heard-this-one-before/feed/0oil-barrel-per-year-b.JPGForeign Oil ImportsMaybe selling off government-owned fossil-fuel infrastructure isn’t such a bad ideahttp://grist.org/transportation/2011-03-03-maybe-selling-off-government-owned-fossil-fuel-infrastructure/
http://grist.org/transportation/2011-03-03-maybe-selling-off-government-owned-fossil-fuel-infrastructure/#respondFri, 04 Mar 2011 03:49:56 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-03-maybe-selling-off-government-owned-fossil-fuel-infrastructure/]]>Might a little bit of the free market be just what we need to get Americans paying something closer to the true cost of driving?Photo: Marius WatzEveryone knows about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s unhinged attack on his state’s unions, but did you know that he’s also pushing for the right to “sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant [PDF] or … contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount”?

Walker’s not alone in his inclination to sell off public infrastructure; for the past several years, budget-strapped governors and mayors all around the country have been trying to unload their roads, ports, and even parking meters for a temporary budget fix.

Though the influx of money is nice, most of the time these politicians face critics who condemn the moves as economic foolishness, Band-Aids on structural problems.

Matt Taibbi points out in his new book Griftopia that many of the private investors eager to snap up this infrastructure are playing with money from oil states like Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. He writes about the proposed sell-off of the Pennsylvania Turnpike:

When you’re trying to sell a highway that was once considered one of your nation’s great engineering marvels — 532 miles of hard-built road that required tons of dynamite, wood, and steel and the labor of thousands to bore seven mighty tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains — when you’re offering that up to petro-despots just so you can fight off a single-year budget shortfall, just so you can keep the lights on in the state house into the next fiscal year, you’ve entered a new stage in your societal development.

He means that in a bad way, but could this trend actually mark a positive new stage in our societal development?

What Taibbi fails to point out (at least in this excerpt of his book) is that we shouldn’t be particularly proud of the Turnpike. It is just one expensive, crumbling cog in our national fossil-fuel-based infrastructure, one of many embarrassing reminders of the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

When you look at the situation in this light, it almost seems like we’re playing a clever trick by selling off this stuff. We have a ton of sunk costs in our petroleum-based transportation infrastructure. We’re spending more than $300 million a day to buy oil from foreign countries. Now, we’re getting them to give some of the money back to us — in the form of 99-year leases of things like toll highways and parking meters. When we reach our post-carbon future, those assets will be near-worthless.

Consider Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ decision in 2006 to lease the Indiana Toll Road. As Matt Dellinger describes in the book Interstate 69, Daniels determined that it cost more for the state of Indiana simply to collect the tolls than the state was taking in from toll money. If that’s the case, why not shut down all the toll booths and just put out a cigar box?

But leasing the Toll Road was even more of a no-brainer for Daniels than the “honor system” option, because the company signed a detailed contract requiring it to maintain the road. In one move, Daniels got $3.85 billion to help take care of his budget problem, and got the state off the hook for the responsibility of operating and maintaining the highway. It’s a win-win even before you consider that the public value of the road is set to nosedive as gas prices soar and car trips decline.

Surely Republicans like Walker and Daniels haven’t been paging through The Post-Carbon Reader, but they may have unwittingly hit on a great strategy for transitioning to a clean-energy future: get rich private interests to buy up dirty-energy infrastructure that will become obsolete in a post-peak-oil, carbon-constrained world.

It makes sense to conservative politicians because it decreases the size of government. For the rest of us, when we get conservatives to admit that our fossil-fuel-based infrastructure is no longer cost-effective, that’s one step down the road of admitting we need to replace it with something better.

First, he appointed his 22-year-old daughter to be assistant to his chief of staff. This would be an ill-advised move in any administration, especially when your state has high unemployment, but it’s particularly unwise if you’ve never held public office before and could clearly benefit from a staff that knows what it’s doing.

Next, his clashing with the NAACP over Martin Luther King Jr. Day (“tell them to kiss my butt”) involved his bizarre claim that he should be exempt from criticism because he has a black “son.” (The young man in question, though he did live with the LePage family for a few years, was never adopted by LePage and in fact already has a father in Jamaica.)

weaken a new law that would require manufacturers to take back and recycle old products

reverse a ruling that the chemical bisphenol A (linked to cancer, obesity, and learning disabilities) should be phased out of children’s products

relax air emissions standards

replace the state Board of Environmental Protection

weaken state environmental standards that are stronger than federal standards

LePage is trying to do all this with a very weak mandate from the voters. He was elected with a mere 38.1 percent of the vote in a four-way race, in a low-turnout midterm year. (Contrast his 216,000 votes to the 421,000 votes Barack Obama got from Maine in 2008.)

The second-place finisher, independent Eliot Cutler, and third-place finisher, Democrat Libby Mitchell — who combined for 55 percent of the vote — were both strong voices for environmental protection, as are the state’s two moderate Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. LePage, with his anti-environmental views and proclivity for wacky, conspiratorial rants, is way out of step with his state.

After a couple years of watching LePage’s antics, Mainers may be inspired to follow the lead of states like Georgia and Texas and require that candidates get 50.1 percent of the vote or face a runoff.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2011-01-27-paul-lepage-new-maine-guv-takes-aim-at-the-environment/feed/2lepageME.jpgPaul LePageGenghis Khan — not that green after allhttp://grist.org/article/2011-01-26-genghis-khan-not-that-green-after-all/
http://grist.org/article/2011-01-26-genghis-khan-not-that-green-after-all/#respondThu, 27 Jan 2011 09:14:07 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-01-26-genghis-khan-not-that-green-after-all/]]>For one thing, this statue has large carbon footprints.Photo: ChinneebInfamous Mongol warlord Genghis Khan conquered much of Central Asia and China and killed tens of millions of people along the way. But in a clear case of researchers taking the lemons of history and trying to make some delicious, 800-year-old lemonade, a recent study highlights the supposed green benefits of Genghis’ mass slaughter:

[Genghis’ impact on climate] can be told in one word: reforestation. When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

In fairness to the researchers, they were merely trying to explore various instances of human-caused climate change in history. The “history’s greenest conqueror” angle is courtesy of Mother Nature Network.

“The reality may be a bit difficult for today’s environmentalists to stomach,” writes MNN’s Bryan Nelson. You don’t say.

Check the MetaFilter comment thread for appropriate snarky reaction; highlights include “Pol Pot wasn’t repressing his people — he was going green” and “Jonathan Swift: Ireland’s most modest gourmand?”

But this notion that Genghis was green in any way is really off base. If there was anything he liked more than slaughtering entire cities, it was fathering children. As Ian Frazier writes in his book Travels in Siberia:

Genghis had hundreds of wives and concubines among different harems around his empire. … Of course, Genghis and his heirs fathered many children. A Persian historian writing about the Mongols in 1260 [Ed.: Genghis died in 1227] said that by then the Mongol leader had twenty thousand descendants living; the historian added that he knew he would be accused of exaggerating.

Recently, geneticists from Oxford University working with colleagues from China, Pakistan, Mongolia, and Uzbekistan spent 10 years taking blood samples from men in Central Asia to study the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son. The geneticists found that a distinctive cluster of Y chromosomes in the DNA of 8 percent of the men indicated descent from a single common ancestor about a thousand years ago. The geneticists believed that the ancestor was Genghis Khan (or rather, an eleventh-century ancestor of Genghis Khan). From this study they concluded that in Central Asia, about sixteen million men — or about one-half of one percent of the world’s entire male population — is descended from Genghis Khan.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2011-01-26-genghis-khan-not-that-green-after-all/feed/0gkhan-Chinneeb.jpgGenghis KhanWorld Series inspires opponents of California's Prop 23http://grist.org/article/2010-11-01-world-series-inspires-opponents-california-prop-23/
http://grist.org/article/2010-11-01-world-series-inspires-opponents-california-prop-23/#respondTue, 02 Nov 2010 03:49:50 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2010-11-01-world-series-inspires-opponents-california-prop-23/]]>An anti-Prop 23 ad takes a baseball theme.Texas and the San Francisco Bay Area aren’t just going head to head in the World Series this week — they’re also battling it out over California’s contentious Prop 23. The ballot measure, which would suspend California’s landmark climate law, has been heavily funded by Texas oil companies.

Get ready, California — today ain’t just about the Giants vs. the Rangers. Texas is also challenging California to a major political showdown that pits Big Oil against the clean energy revolution … [A]s I’m rooting for the Giants to shut out the Rangers in the World Series, I’m also working to shut out Texas at the polls.

As if the underscore the contrast between the cleantech-loving Bay Area and oil-loving Texas, George W. Bush — every oilman’s favorite president — threw out the first pitch at last night’s game.

Right now the Giants have a 3-1 lead. Game 5 is tonight in Texas, and games 6 and 7 (if necessary) will be played in San Francisco on Wednesday and Thursday.

Could the outcome of the series actually affect the outcome of the election? If San Francisco wins tonight, might the all-night party keep some hungover voters from making it to the polls on Tuesday? Or if Texas wins game 5, might Giants fans be all the more motivated to stick it to Texas (oil) in the voting booth?

Cox, a scientist and agricultural researcher who lives in Salina, Kansas, doesn’t paint AC as the bogeyman. Rather, he makes the point that our world has developed in many unsustainable directions overall, and air-conditioning has been a crucial part of that development. He also argues that making air-conditioners and other appliances more energy efficient isn’t going to get us out of this mess. He spoke to Grist last week about his new book. Open a window, undo a button, and enjoy …

—–

Q.Why did you write a book on air-conditioning?

A. In the past half-century, a number of big, energy-guzzling technologies have really changed our lives: automobiles, computers, television, jet aircraft. All that time, air-conditioning has been humming away in the background, like a character actor you see in a whole bunch of movies. It’s never the star, but it always seems to be there moving the plot along.

When I looked at the doubling in the amount of electricity used for air conditioning homes in this country just since the mid-90s, I thought, we really need to address this, because it is a big contributor to greenhouse-gas release and it’s going to increase the likelihood that we’re going to have longer, more intense heat waves and hotter summers in the future, and we’re going to have to be running the air-conditioning even more.

Q.That seemed to be a theme throughout the book — that the use of air-conditioning leads to a cycle where it needs to be used more.

A. Yes, the biggest example of that is probably global warming. But there are a lot of ways in which air-conditioning creates need for itself, including by eroding our heat tolerance. Once we’ve built office buildings and commercial buildings on the assumption of air-conditioning, then we pretty much have to use it. We’ve created a lot of space that’s almost uninhabitable without it. In many buildings, the windows don’t open at all anymore.

In the book, I put a lot of emphasis on what’s known as the adaptive model of comfort. It’s based on surveys of people who are working at different temperatures and asked if they’re comfortable. People can psychologically adjust to buildings that are cooler in the winter and warmer in the summer. The comment I’ve heard most since the book came out is from people who work in offices and complain that their offices are too cold in the summer, and they have to take sweaters or use space heaters, wasting even more energy. Without eroding people’s working conditions or quality of life at all, there could be a big savings there.

Q.I thought it was interesting that you linked AC to obesity, in the sense that people are indoors more often and their bodies don’t have to work to adjust to the temperature changes during the year.

A. Right, that’s one of the hypotheses that a group of medical researchers came up with to explain the rise in obesity — the slower burning of energy by the body in the comfort range, where it doesn’t have to work to either shed heat or generate heat (in addition to the normal explanations that people are eating more and exercising less). Another way AC could be affecting obesity is that people tend to eat more when in cooler conditions. And also, by making the indoors more attractive in the summertime, we’ve made it less likely that people are going to be outdoors where we’re more physically active.

Q.Has the advent of AC led to more social isolation, where we’re within our own homes and don’t interact as much with the community?

A. That’s right. Starting in the South, which led the nation into air-conditioning, you had the erosion of what they called the front-porch culture — neighbors would drop in on each other when they saw them sitting on the porch, kids would be running up and down the block.

[In the book, there’s] an anecdote from a friend of mine who was out in her yard on a June day in Kansas when the power went out, and people started drifting out of their houses, and it sort of turned into an impromptu block party. She noticed nobody seemed to be going in to call the power company. Instead they’d seized the opportunity to socialize and get out of their cold isolation.

Q.AC has spurred a huge migration to hotter climates and drier climates.

A. It has allowed us to put cities in very fragile ecological zones like the desert area where Phoenix is, or the fringes of the Everglades, or actually out into the Everglades now in South Florida. We build up these big Sun Belt cities on the assumption of air-conditioning, so there’s limited green space. The heat island effect becomes pretty overwhelming — all the asphalt, concrete, and steel are trapping heat that’s then released throughout the night. In Phoenix you can easily have a lot of nights where the temperature never drops below 90, while in the normal desert climate you get a big drop in temperature.

By virtue of the fact that there was so much cheap land in the Sun Belt, there’s been this huge migration from the north and there’s much more sprawl in Sun Belt cities, so they’re generally more dependent on automobiles. When drivers are stuck in freeway traffic jams, they’re using the AC. So you have again this vicious circle where the kind of development that air-conditioning has fostered in the Sun Belt cities requires the use of even more air-conditioning.

Stan CoxQ.You write that energy efficiency is not the answer to our problems. Why?

A. The way economies work, efficiency and total consumption of energy always tend to rise together. Having greater energy efficiency, as a friend of mine likes to say, is like putting energy on sale. We’ll find more ways to use it.

Since the mid-90s, residential air-conditioners have increased in efficiency by 28 percent, but the amount of energy used to cool the average household in the U.S. has increased by 37 percent. Part of the reason is that house size has increased dramatically — we’re cooling much more square footage per house. And we’ve had hotter summers, and more people are turning to central air rather than room cooling. If it had been more expensive to heat and cool a house, we probably wouldn’t have had people wanting to build bigger and bigger houses.

There’s nothing wrong with greater efficiency, but that has to be preceded by a commitment to put some very hard limits on the total amount of energy or other resources that we’re
going to use. That limit is going to have to be decreased year by year.

I didn’t write the book to call for a ban on air-conditioning, but if we take the sensible route and put overall limits on consumption, then people and businesses might see air-conditioning as a very good place to start cutting back, if they think about some of what we’ve lost in the age of air-conditioning.

Q.You make the case that we have to cut back our growth and our consumption, but that’s not compatible with the way our capitalist economy functions. So what is the potential solution to this?

A. Everybody in a position of power is talking about how to get economic growth racing ahead again, because that’s simply the way capitalist economies work — they have to have continuous growth. Despite some of the things you hear, that growth in the GDP is always going to be linked to growth in consumption of material resources and the generation of waste. Profits have to be generated, and they have to grow not just in the linear fashion, but by a certain percentage each year, and the bigger the economy gets, the more it has to grow in a given year to achieve that percentage. We’re reaching the edge of the petri dish here. A lot of footprint analyses show we’re already consuming more than one planet can provide. I cite one study by a professor at the University of Utah showing that even in the greenest scenario, using the best green technology, renewable energy and so forth, to stay below 450 ppm CO2, the world economy is going to have to shrink by 1 to 4 percent per year over the next 40 years. We’re going to have to have a different economic system, which is much easier said than done.

And the other thing we’re going to have to have, which nobody is going to like, is a pretty massive transfer of wealth from wealthy individuals, areas, or countries to those that are less wealthy. When you say we have to reduce the output of the economy by so much each year, there are many, many people in the world that have nothing to reduce. They actually need a bit more production just to get the basic necessities of life. Luxuries like AC have been promoted to the status of necessity, and we’re going to have to have an economy that returns to putting the necessities of life first, making sure everybody’s got those, and then see what’s left.

Unfortunately I’m not, and I’m not sure who is, smart enough to know how to get out of our situation. But I think people do respond to emergencies. A lot of people who lived through World War II or the Depression become very nostalgic about the way people had to share. People saw life as being much more important than the amount of money you made. It’s possible, I think, for people to think differently.

Minnesota governor candidate Tom Emmer (R)

“Radical activists are trying to convince us that everyday nutrients are causing cancer, that cows are causing ‘global warming,’ and that hogs are getting people sick. Logical people know otherwise,” he says on his campaign website. His site also bashes an opponent for having “jumped on the global warming bandwagon.”

New Mexico governor candidate Susana Martinez (R)

“I’m not sure the science completely supports that,” she told Politico when asked about the role of humans in climate change.

Florida governor candidate Rick Scott (R)

“I have not been convinced” of the reality of climate change, he told The St. Petersburg Times. Asked what would convince him, he said, “Something more convincing than what I’ve read.”

Massachusetts governor candidate Charlie Baker (R)

“I’m not saying I believe in it, I’m not saying I don’t,” he told The Boston Globe. “You’re asking me to take a position on something I don’t know enough about. I absolutely am not smart enough to believe that I know the answer to that question.”

Baker later said he thinks humans are contributing to climate change but he opposes cap-and-trade, Politico reports. Now his campaign site says, “I’m concerned about the effects of climate change on our environment.”

Illinois governor candidate Bill Brady (R)

“No, I don’t accept that premise, and it is wrong,” he said last year at an event with other GOP governor contenders, after another candidate said, “I don’t accept the premise that man is the cause of global warming, if global warming even exists.”

Maine governor candidate Paul LePage (R)

“Exactly,” he said, after a radio talk show host said, “the entire global warming thing is a hoax anyway.” And after the host continued, “Not just flawed science — made-up science, lying science,” LePage responded, “Exactly. Al Gore must be just laughing himself into a frenzy here. ‘Cause he’s making millions off it.” Read more from this radio interview with LePage.